Midsummer of minor muddle

The unions that represent academic staff in universities, the AUT and Natfhe, have started a campaign of industrial action in support of their pay claim. The unions claim that they will "disrupt the universities" and "cause chaos". So are we heading for a winter of discontent or merely a midsummer of minor muddle?

The action has started with a one-day strike. All good stuff until you realise that strikes at universities are not quite like strikes elsewhere. Many staff, who are not union members, will be at work. Union enthusiasts will be off work and on the picket line. Some union members will decide that a strike is not going to make any difference except to lose them a day's pay, so they will work normally. Then there is the ambiguous middle. These are colleagues who are both on strike and working at the same time. They may join a protest march at lunch time, spend an hour on the picket line and then "just pop in to give a lecture" as they don't want their students to miss out.

This quaint confusion helps both sides. The unions can confidently declare that they had the overwhelming support of their members, while the university can smugly pronounce that staff were working normally. It is a classic academic action.

Once we have got the strike out of the way, the situation could turn ugly. The AUT-Natfhe plan is to take "action short of a strike". This means a boycott of examinations and assessments, so students cannot progress or qualify. This is a devastating action, as it strikes at the core of the academic process and seeks to cynically exploit students as cannon-fodder in the pay dispute. The sole reason that this industrial dispute has been started by the AUT-Natfhe six months before the pay rise is due is so that the unions can see if the sanction will work. They never intended or expected to negotiate a settlement.

The assessment boycott is very attractive to the unions as they believe that their members will be paid as usual, as this is "action short of a strike". So the opportunity exists to bring the primary business of the university to a complete halt and still toddle off home at the end of the month with the salary cheque happily deposited in the bank. Unbelievable! Can you imagine Arthur Scargill leading the miners down the pit, then telling them not to dig any coal but still expecting them to be paid? Absolutely ludicrous and completely unacceptable.

Fortunately, the legal position is clear. An employee cannot choose which aspects of the job they undertake. If they do, it is called partial performance. The employer does not have to pay anything if the contract is partially performed. So if someone refuses to set an examination, or marks a paper but does not hand over the marks, the university is legally entitled to stop their pay.

The unions believe most VCs are fully paid-up members of the Amalgamated Union of Wimps and Woosies. Their strategy is entirely based on the idea that VCs will not stop pay and will prefer to ride out the storm from students not getting exam results.

If pay is stopped, the action will collapse. While there is proper and understandable loyalty to the unions from their members, there is a limit to that loyalty and it will get severely tested at pay day.

This is all a bit of a shame. The unions' argument that they should have some benefit in pay as a result of the higher fees has merit. Their cynical attempt to use industrial action that will damage students' academic progress is a grave misjudgment and distracts from the real debate about pay. The issue will become the industrial action, not the legitimacy of a pay claim. It is absolutely essential that their cynical action fails. So the rule has to be, if you don't work normally, then you will not be paid. That would be the principle that real trade unions would follow; anything else is morally indefensible.